OFF-GRID TOILETS Compilation, Analysis and Comparison

Dr Paco Mejias Villatoro is an architect, urban planner and academic, codirector of Estudio Abierto/Open Studio, a collaborative think-and-do tank, operating at the intersection between architecture and urbanism (www.thisstudioisopen). He has expertise in community design, empathic urbanism and social ecology, and he has been conducting research about ultra-dense urbanism and informal settlements, particularly focused on Dhaka since 2014. He has been teaching architecture and urban planning since 1997 in Spain, Canada, the USA, China and the UK, where he teaches architecture at the University of Liverpool.

Dr Junjie Xi is a lecturer in architectural design and humanities at the University of Liverpool. She was previously a Postdoctoral researcher for the China Railway Group Limited and School of Architecture, Tsinghua University. She continues her research in railway development and has completed a new book with Dr Paco Mejias Villatoro – China’s Railway Transformation: History, Culture Changes and Urban Development, which is published by Routledge in December 2022. Through research in infrastructure, she developed a focus on the informal settlements in Bangladesh, aiming to provide better sanitation system for the future.

Dr Tanzil Shafique is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at The University of Sheffield School of Architecture and an Associate of the Urban Institute. His research weaves across urban informality, decoloniality and pluriversality, and brings a socio-political reading of the built environment. He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, where his thesis looked at the everyday design practices by citizens of the largest informal settlement in Bangladesh. Previously he worked as a Project Designer at the University of Arkansas Community Design Center. He has an M.Arch in Ecological Urbanism from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and a B.Arch from BRAC University, Dhaka.